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Building a Coaching Culture across the Medical School and beyond

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Many people at Imperial will have heard something about coaching-a powerful approach to support learning and development which has been expanding in recent years in both education and health. As part of their drive in leading excellence in medical education, Dr Arti Maini and Dr Sonia Kumar from the Undergraduate Primary Care Teaching team have been leading on developing a coaching culture across the Medical School at Imperial (supported through Medical School Innovation funding). In addition to her educational role as Deputy Director for Undergraduate Primary Care Education at Imperial, Arti is an accredited coach, coach trainer and supervisor and co-author of the book ‘Coaching for Health’. She works as a coach for the Imperial Coaching Academy and sits on its strategy group.
A large number of educators have been trained in this coaching approach: the undergraduate primary care teaching team, Imperial’s academic GP VTS, community GP tutors, personal tutors and the Career Champion network and research facilitators from the Imperial College Academic Health Science Centre. All those trained are able to access ongoing coaching supervision to support their learning. Work is in progress with Imperial’s Ed Tech team to develop innovative digital learning modules in coaching for education and health so watch this space!
Arti is now working closely with the EDU offering coaching courses that are formally accredited by the Royal College of Physicians. The coaching programme has attracted attention nationally and internationally and medical schools across the UK and Canada are keen to learn more about our approach.
Examples of quotes from faculty include:

"The session felt tailored and it was good to be able to practice. For me it worked perfectly and exceeded my expectations.”
“The most surprising thing about the course was how transformative it was”.
“This has radically changed my view of the power of language and I don’t think I appreciated it until doing this course”
“I can see multiple scenarios for the coachee-centred approach to coaching/teaching/training”
“The course has reinforced my understanding of how beneficial a tool this can be and developed my skills significantly”
In parallel to training medical educators, Arti has also been busy training medical students in Year 3 and Year 5 in health coaching skills (supported through funding from HENWL). Evaluation so far has been very positive demonstrating positive impact for patients and for the students themselves. Arti has been working with the Head of Academic Support for the Early Years to explore how coaching may best be used to maximise the successfulness of learning approaches.
Examples of quotes from students are:
“I think patients… feel quite empowered. They're sort of very motivated about what to do next and it's nice to see that you've sort of left them with that sense that they can change what they want”.
“I think it makes the medical student more valuable to, you know, the hospital or the GP”.
“It’s just generally my motivation seems to be increased”
“I guess if you have an issue it makes it easier to deal with because you now have like a structure of exactly...you know the exact structure of how to solve your own problems essentially”.
“I've noticed quite significant transformation in the way I interact with people. I'm much more receptive and I think I listen more. I find... Well we are listening in conversation but I find a lot of the time we aren't listening. So the quality of listening has gone up…it just makes the conversation a lot better.”
Going forward, the Undergraduate Primary Care team are developing health coaching to incorporate a socially accountable ethos, building in ‘service learning’ approaches across its courses. Students in Year 3 and Year 5 who have trained in health coaching skills have started working with patients from diverse local communities, holding empowering conversations to support them with their issues around health and lifestyle.
We look forward to develop our health coaching courses further over the coming year as we continue to work with our department’s Self Care Academic Research Unit (SCARU), Imperial’s community engagement team at the new White City campus, with White City Enterprise and the Dalgarno Trust in North Kensington and Dr Paquita de Zulueta who leads the Grenfell Clinical Outreach Team.
We will be offering a new Special Choice Placement on Health Promotion in 2018-19 where students from Year 5 will have the opportunity to learn health coaching skills and put them into practice in making a real meaningful difference to local communities.
We are currently evaluating the student health coaching training through questionnaires and focus groups and interim findings suggest a positive impact on patients, host GP practices and on the students themselves. Over the coming year we will be looking at how to increase patient involvement in health coaching course evaluation and research.
If you would like to find out more about the coaching-related work being carried out by our department, please contact Arti on a.maini@imperial.ac.uk  or Sonia on Sonia.kumar@imperial.ac.uk

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